Ruth-full Nation... Immigration on the Front Burner

As our nation wrangles with trying to work out a clear, fair and less complicated policy of immigration reform, allow me to comment from the biblical perspective and from the viewpoint of the lowly, seeing this issue through the eyes of the world's poor who are still streaming to our country centuries after our founding. To be clear, I am a Christian first before I am a US citizen. I also have a responsibility worldwide as a member of the Body of Christ for the well being of "the least of these". I have a command to love my neighbors, which according to the parable of the Good Samaritan includes cross cultural benevolence. Secondly, as a US Citizen, I must respect the rule of law and uphold our nation's need for security in a fallen world. Christians are instructed to be upstanding citizens and through the salt and light become an agent of transformation to the surrounding culture.

Given that Tony Blair said, when asked about the greatness of the United States , during his tenure as Britain's Prime Minister, that ( to paraphrase) as long as people were seeking to get in and not out, that fact clearly demonstrates the greatness of the United States. It is an honor that we are a magnet for the nations. Immigration makes our history unique and admirable and the management of the flow of people into our country who want to be here creates a complex system of procedures and laws. As with every bureaucracy, streamlining and allowing for common sense to rule the day can be a daunting task.

Since I work very closely with refugees and asylees here at Joseph House and here in Laconia, NH, I thought I would relate one story to give you a glimpse of the pitfalls of our system.

Guli is a Russian, Turkish immigrant, mother of three and wife to her husband of ten years. She worked at McDonald's in Manchester and transferred her job to move to Laconia where she lived with us at Joseph House for a year and a half before moving to Kentucky. I helped this family maintain their paperwork with the State Department. They came as political refugees, with legal status, so they had social security cards, first year immigrant visas as refugees and I-94 cards for the adults to work. Within one year they had to apply for permanent residency. The burden is on them to apply and it is very expensive, costing hundreds of dollars for each family member . They also had to pay back their airfare in a timely fashion that was borrowed for them to arrive in the USA. We filed all the necessary paperwork and their status was "pending". The INS has an online mechanism to check the status but they warned about a nine month waiting period. Meanwhile she had no Green Card documentation for her job, since her original I-94 card was expired. McDonald's waited and waited. She was warned about her situation from her manager at McD's but they were patient. If McDonald's were audited by some organization , she would have been classified as "undocumented" in her work status because she was not issued any paperwork in her pending status. I called on their behalf a number of times to be advised as to what to do, but had no satisfactory answer. She eventually got her status of permanent residency and the necessary Green Card about 1 and 1/4 years into the process.

This is why I am warning all my Law and Order friends, and I have many of them, that once again our Federal bureaucracy creates conditions that even the most earnest and diligent would find daunting. The visceral and xenophobic fear of new immigrants has also been a shadow over our centuries of immigration. Each new wave was considered vile and counter productive , even dangerous to our American way of life. I am looking to bring light and not more heat to this discussion. I have more to say but would like to pause and engage readers in some thoughtful discussion. After all that is what blogs are for, rather than mere bloviation. We get enough of that from the "talking heads" of info-tainment.